Inmate’s Lament: ‘Rather Be Dead Than Here’
SAN SALVADOR — In a prison called Hope, there is little of it to go around.
Inmates at La Esperanza penitentiary here cram into “the caves,” their name for the suffocating spaces underneath bunk beds, desperate for a place to sleep. Others sprawl out on every inch of floor under a thicket of exposed electrical wires in sweltering, dirty cells, until they can come up with the $35 or more they will need to buy space on a bunk from fellow prisoners. In these tight quarters, it has become a flourishing trade.
The 19 prisons in this country were built to hold 8,000 people. These days, 24,000 are stuffed into them, leaving inmates to string hammocks from the ceiling or bed down on the floor of a library that is now too full of prisoners to hold any books.
Such overcrowding is not uncommon in Latin America. But after a grisly prison fire killed 360 inmates in Honduras last month and a massacre killed 44 in Mexico less than a week later, prison administrators and investigators are warning that the problem has sunk to new depths, spurred by the growing power of criminal groups and the mounting demand to stop them.
full: www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/world/americas/in-latin-america-prisons-condemned-to-crisis.html?pagewanted=all
the accompanying photo (from the Ilopango prison in El Salvador):
Meanwhile: an overcrowded prison in California (source, LA Times):
